A better erg score can save parents thousands of dollars in tuition cost..

Are a parent of a high school student who loves to row?  You may be in luck or not...

You are in luck, if your child has a good erg score.  A good erg score, a.k.a. fast 2K on a Concept2 rowing machine, makes rowing coaches foam at the mouth.  If your child is a girl with a good score, you could get thousands of $ off tuition through a rowing scholarship.  For the boys it is a little different.  Men's crew at the University level does not receive funding from the athletic department because of title IX.  However,  a good erg score for a male rower can get him into a great rowing university.  The better the 2K the more likely a H.S. student is to be recruited for a university crew program.

If your child's erg score is not good enough yet... you are in luck, because I can help you.  If your son or daughter is determined to put in the rowing meters, I can help lower the erg score by twenty seconds depending on how much time is left before applying to a university.

Through superior internet speed, helping rowers worldwide, has become the main part of my coaching business.  I receive rowing clips on a daily basis.  These excerpts are between 45 and 60 seconds long, taken at 90 degrees, full side view.  I complete a slow motion stroke analysis by carefully explaining and graphically illustrate the strong and weak points of a rowers technique.  I then explain which technical drills need to be done to improve power application.  Each analysis comes complete with a one month training program. 

Your child's rowing stroke improves dramatically without pain. 

With today's tuition cost averaging $28,000 per year it is an absolute must to utilize a professional stroke analysis, by one of the most successful rower and coach in history.

Learn more at www.xenorowingcoach.com

Sincerely,
Xeno Müller
Olympic gold and silver medalist, Olympic record holder.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

What, my rest is already over?

I coached a junior today.  We did rowing specific resistance work. Without getting into the detail of the workload, a new blog topic came to me:  Why stress over rest when the pieces are hard enough.

Five days before the Olympics

Once I quit my competitive career and began to coach privately, I started hearing from rowers' hellish stories of interval training with little to no time to rest between pieces.  The first few times I heard of these brutal beatings I exclaimed by saying how sorry I was about being subject to such senseless abuse and that it must be hard.  Then after hearing such tales over and over, I started growing a thicker skin and simply responded, by saying: "This type of training leads to nothing else but physiological plateau, mental burnout, technical stagnation, and injury; your coach should be beaten (figuratively speaking) and drug behind the coaching launch (also figuratively speaking) for the amount of pain he or she puts you through."

Hard pieces are meant to teach the athlete to move the boat as efficiently as possible through the water no matter what level of pain is felt.  Therefore giving a break between pieces that is "too" short sabotages the ability to find maximum efficient speed.  Some coaches will argue that the shorter break brings more stress to the rower or crew and makes finding maximum speed in the boat even harder.  Yes.., but what does the rower or crew get out of it when they are barely conscience of their movements... the experience of living with pain and keeping the body moving.  Well that does not make you win races...

I follow the 100%+ method.  No matter how hard or long the pieces are, the rest time is of same length if not more depending on physical distress.  My goal as athlete was always to execute my pieces with the best possible technique and greatest aggression.  I made sure that I kept full control over the boat and that the blades were set in the water as the hands moved to the stern.  It was crucial for me to feel the draw of my hamstrings as I moved the foot board back to my seat.  Thanks to the appropriate rest between pieces, I was able to deliver a sound accelerating stroke, a single scull gliding on the water like a skate on ice with puddles quickly passing the stern.

Xeno
I coach rowers worldwide on www.xenorowingcoach.com and make it easy for others to use their rowing machine at www.row2go.com.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Mens eights final Sydney 2000 olympic regatta.mpeg

Harry Mahon, one of two coaches of the GBR 8+, was my coach. This eight is a beautiful demonstration of how much technique matters. No eight has yet achieved such perfection. Harry Mahon is awesome, rest in peace Harry.

Xeno Muller

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Lange Training Film 2 XOlympic gold medalist and bronze medalist

I found a gem of technical analysis. Thomas Lange was my idol, although the goal was not to row like him, his toughness is what I wanted to emulate. Great athlete he is.
Xeno Muller

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.

Some common mistakes when training for endurance competitions.

Hello rowers and endurance athletes.

Congratulations and thank you for illustrating my first point I am about to make on personality of an athlete or coach.  Through your active search, you found me and this article, because you are in search of greater aerobic capacity for either yourself or people you train, which in turn describes you as a motivated individual.

1996 Olympics, Derek Porter, Xeno Muller, Thomas Lange, Olympic record 6:44.85

Do rowers and coaches know when to slow down?

In order to achieve maximum results from training, the mind and body need to be in harmony.  From personal experience as an Olympic gold/silver medalist and coach I have noticed that athletes too often forget to look for the connection between the two.  Such disconnect can be caused from guilt and competitive paranoya of the "what if I don't train..."  Athletes are guilty of this as much as coaches.  Coaches who don't understand the importance of limiting hard workouts and neglecting to observe the rowers demeanor during and outside of the workouts, fall into a situation in which more injuries appear and morale of the crew becomes gloomy.  Slowing down is not in the nature of motivated people it must therefore learned and accepted in order to improve fitness.

Believing that achieving new personal bests is mainly caused when the mind gets stronger... another problem.

I have heard it many times from club and university rowers.  As training "progresses" coaches chose to test their crew members to confirm that their training plan delivers better 2K, 6K, and more boat speed.  Some of these coaches also tend to favor harder workouts instead of aerobic training sessions.  When too few personal bests are recorded the coaches' answer are more high intensity training with team meetings denouncing that the crews are not pushing hard enough and that it is a matter of getting mentally tougher to sustain more pain.  For rowers with less coaching interference a similar situation exists.  All-out-effort-self-testing becomes a form of security blanket.  Unfortunately the blanket is sometimes used in moments of doubt, for example when coming out of sickness such as the flu.  In such cases the test which ought to show improvement ends up informing the rower of how much the illness impacted their fitness.  More often than not, the result of the test is less than satisfactory and leads the rower down a path of self-doubt mixed with impatience that lead to harder workouts, because of the idea lost time from being ill needs to be made up.

 "No pain, no gain, no Spain."  Learn from other endurance disciplines, look outside the box.

This was a headline in Sport Illustrated back in 1992 as the world was preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.  Rowing is known to be one of the toughest sports and therefore it is easy to imagine that training has to be filled with intensity and pain.  Many rowers and coaches believe that rowing success comes from going through hell on water and land.  This concept of training is so wrong, it makes me cringe.  My coaches' adopted training methods from different disciplines such as cross country skiing, flat water kayak, cycling, and Olympic weight lifting.  Learning from mistakes and successes of other successful.

Training on Lake Sarnen, Switzerland

Improvement in rowing comes through a carefully mixed training program that gives the athlete enough time to recover from hard workouts and plenty of aerobic mileage to increase the mitochondria count in muscle cells throughout the body and not just the core rowing muscles. Cross training is crucial to avoid chronic injuries, mental burnout, yet extremely beneficial for total body fitness at the molecular level.  As rower, listening to ones body, accepting gut feeling, erring on the side of caution is a better way to becoming a champion.  Coaches need to accept that athletes achieve greater performance through mileage and fine tuning, rather then creating a living hell, where mental toughness is the means to an end.

Now go and puke your gut out at CRASH-B and its satellite regattas.
Xeno, Olympic gold and silver medalist, Olympic record holder.  Row2go, XenoRowingCoach, Digital Workouts.

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.